The New Arab Woman: MEMO in Conversation with Susanna Ferguson

Middle East Monitor Conversations

From raising a family to a nation, how debates around modernisation, democracy and capitalism gave birth to a new Arab woman.

In the 1850s the Arab world underwent a gendered revolution brought about by western missionaries, integration into the global capitalist economy, the print press and reform efforts. Life in the eastern Mediterranean within a few decades after the 1850s was unrecognisable from a few years prior. Women, gender and childrearing were at the centre of tension and changes taking place. Tarbiya, or cultivation, took on a new urgency in Arabic thought, before the 1850s Tarbiya was often used in the context of teachers or sheikh cultivating their students’ intellectual development, but after the 19th century it referred more specifically to women and the raising of children. Raising a child became a political act and the failure to instil ‘good’ ethical and moral norms could bring down nations, it was feared. The notion of women’s work and a good mother being at home became a feature of political debates and tensions. Gendered notions like Tarbiya sit at the cross section of modernisation, democratisation and nation building ideas. Joining us is Susanna Ferguson who is the author of a new book called Labors of Love: Gender, Capitalism, and Democracy in Modern Arab Thought, a review to her book can be found here: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20241023-labors-of-love-gender-capitalism-and-democracy-in-modern-arab-thought/

Susanna Ferguson is a historian of women, gender, and intellectual life in the Eastern Mediterranean and Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies at Smith College. Her research focuses on how questions about gender, sex, and science shaped political imaginaries in the 19th- and 20-century Arab world. Her work has appeared in various scholarly journals, including Modern Intellectual History, the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and the Arab Studies Journal. She is a longtime host, former editor-in-chief and now associate producer at the Ottoman History Podcast, where she also co-curates the series on “Women, Gender, and Sex in the Ottoman World.” Ferguson's first book, Labors of Love: Gender, Capitalism, and Democracy in Modern Arab Thought, was published by Stanford University Press in September 2024.